I. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data networks and computer communications across the data networks. More particularly, the invention relates to the processing of transaction data and billing for transactions across a data network.
II. Description of the Related Art
Wireless devices, such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (“PDAs”), pagers, laptops with wireless connectivity, etc., communicate packets including voice and data over a wireless network. These wireless devices have installed application programming interfaces (“APIs”) onto their local computer platform that allow software developers to create software applications that operate on the wireless device. The API sits between the wireless device system software and the software application, making the wireless device functionality available to the application without requiring the software developer to have the specific wireless device system source code.
The software applications can come pre-loaded at the time the wireless telephone is manufactured, or the user may later request that additional programs be downloaded over cellular telecommunication carrier networks, where the downloaded applications are executable on the wireless telephone. As a result, users of wireless telephones can customize their wireless telephones through the selective downloading of applications, such as games, printed media, stock updates, news, or any other type of information or application that is available for download through the wireless network. In order to manage the cellular telephone resources, the user of the wireless telephone purposefully deletes applications and data from the wireless telephone platform to clear storage space so that new applications can be loaded onto the cleared storage.
In contrast to the larger computer platforms of personal computers and PDAs, wireless devices have limited resources, such as storage and processing, to devote to non-essential applications. Typically, the telecommunication applications have priority of usage of the system resources, with other applications allocated resources as available. The wireless device thus only has a limited capacity for holding all files for applications, and the managing of resources is left up to the discretion of user of the telephone to delete applications to make room for new applications desired downloaded to the wireless device. The wireless device will not otherwise download an application that it does not have the resources to hold and execute.
Applications, and other data, that will be downloaded to a wireless device will require billing processing. Downloading applications, content or other transactions that occur with a wireless device take up resources on a network. A carrier, in the case of a wireless network, will want to record these transactions and bill for it appropriately.
In the case with voice, a carrier only needs to keep track of the amount of time the wireless device is used on the network and bill for the minutes of use. With data, however, the billing paradigm may be different. Carriers may bill for the download or use of a data application separate from how much time it takes on the carrier's network to download the application. To bill for these transactions, the specific transaction will need to be accounted for and billed, not just the amount of time used on the network to perform the transaction.
In addition, with applications, there may be multiple party settlements involved who share in the fee for the billed transaction. For example with an application download transaction, a carrier and a developer may share the download transaction fee incurred by the wireless device. In other cases, such as with downloading content, the carrier, a content provider and/or a third party involved may get part of the fee incurred by the wireless device's use of that content. Consequently, tracking, billing, and maintaining who shares in the fee for the multitude of transactions that occur becomes quite complex. This becomes even more complex when an extremely high number of transactions that may occur on a carrier's network, with thousands, if not millions, of wireless devices performing numerous transactions each.
Therefore, what is needed in the art is a billing method and system to process the transactions that occur over a network.